A.R. Ammons

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). Courtesy NNDB.

Archie Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926 - February 25, 2001) was an American poet, who wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones.

Life

Ammons grew up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, North Carolina, in the southeastern part of the state. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, stationed on board the U.S.S. Gunason, a battleship escort.

After the war, Ammons attended Wake Forest University, majoring in biology.Graduating in 1949, he served as a principal and teacher at Hattaras Elementary School later that year and also married Phyllis Plumbo. He received an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1964, Ammons joined the faculty of Cornell University, eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and poet in residence. He retired from Cornell in 1998.

Ammons had been a longtime resident of Northfield, New Jersey, and Millville, New Jersey, when he wrote Corsons Inlet in 1962.

Writing

Ammons often writes in 2- or 3-line stanzas. Poet David Lehman notes a resemblance between Ammons's terza libre (unrhymed 3-line stanzas) and the terza rima of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Lines are strongly enjambed. Some of Ammons's poems are very short, one or two lines only, while others (for example, the book-length poems Sphere and Tape for the Turn of the Year) are hundreds of lines long, and sometimes composed on adding machine tape or other continuous strips of paper. His National Book Award-winning volume Garbage is a long poem consisting of "a single extended sentence, divided into eighteen sections, arranged in couplets".

Many readers and critics have noted Ammons's idiosyncratic approach to punctuation. Lehman has written that Ammons "bears out T.S. Eliot's observation that poetry is a 'system of punctuation'." Instead of periods, some poems end with an ellipses; others have no terminal punctuation at all. The colon is an Ammons "signature"; he uses it "as an all-purpose punctuation mark."

The colon permits him to stress the linkage between clauses and to postpone closure indefinitely.... When I asked Archie about his use of colons, he said that when he started writing poetry, he couldn't write if he thought "it was going to be important," so he wrote "on the back of used mimeographed paper my wife brought home, and I used small [lowercase] letters and colons, which were democratic, and meant that there would be something before and after [every phrase] and the writing would be a kind of continuous stream."

According to critic Stephen Burt, in many poems Ammons combines 3 types of diction:

A “normal” range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature (“vast,” “summon,” “universal”).* A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up (“dibbles”), and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems (“blip”).* The Greek- and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences (“millimeter,” “information of actions / summarized”), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics.

Such a mixture is nearly unique, Burt says; these three modes are "almost never found together outside his poems".

As far as topics often addressed by Ammons, those of religious and philosophical concern are visited in his works as are many scenes involving nature, almost in a Transcendental fashion. According to Daniel Hoffman, who wrote a book review on Ammons, stated that his work "is founded on an implied Emersonian division of experience into Nature and the Soul," adding that it "sometimes consciously echo[es] familiar lines from Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson "

Recognition

During the 5 decades of his poetic career, Ammons was the recipient of many awards and citations. Among his major honors are two National Book Awards (in 1973, for Collected Poems 1951-1971, and 1993, for Garbage); the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (1998); and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the year the award was established. Ammons also had a school in Miami, Florida, named after him.

Ammons's other awards include a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Coast of Trees; a 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Garbage; the 1971 Bollingen Prize for Sphere; the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal; the Ruth Lilly Prize; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.

Publications

Poetry

• Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1955. x
• Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1964. x
• Corsons Inlet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965; New York: Norton, 1967. ISBN 0-393-04463-7 x
• Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965; New York: Norton, 1972. ISBN 0-393-00659-X
• Northfield Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
• Selected Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968.
• Uplands. New York: Norton, 1970. ISBN 0-393-04322-3 x
• Briefings: Poems small and easy. New York: Norton, 1971. ISBN 0-393-04326-6
• Collected Poems: 1951-1971. New York: Norton, 1972. ISBN 0-393-04241-3
• Sphere: The form of a motion. New York: Norton, 1974. ISBN 0-393-04388-6
• Diversification: Poems. New York: Norton, 1975. ISBN 0-393-04414-9
• The Selected Poems: 1951-1977. New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-04465-3
• Highgate Road. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
• The Snow Poems . New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-04467-X
• Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. ISBN 0-393-01297-2
• A Coast of Trees: Poems. New York: Norton, 1981. ISBN 0-393-01447-9
• Worldly Hopes: Poems. New York: Norton, 1982. ISBN 0-393-01518-1
• Lake Effect Country. New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN 0-393-01702-8
• The Selected Poems: Expanded edition. New York & London: Norton, 1986. ISBN 0-393-02411-3
• Sumerian Vistas. New York & London: Norton, 1987. ISBN 0-393-02468-7
• The Really Short Poems. New York: Norton, 1991. ISBN 0-393-02870-4
• Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993. ISBN 0-393-03542-5
• Tape for the Turn of the Year. New York & London: Norton, 1993.
• The North Carolina Poems. Alex Albright, ed. Rocky Mount, NC: NC Wesleyan College P, 1994. ISBN 0-933598-51-3 x
• Brink Roaf: Poems.New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0-393-03958-7
• Glare. New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-04096-8
• Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: Norton, 2001.
• Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN 0-393-05952-9 x
• Selected Poems. (edited by David Lehman). New York: Library of America, 2006. ISBN 1-931082-93-6

Prose

• Set in Motion: Essays, interviews, and dialogues. (edited by Zofia Burr). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 

Collected editions

• Selected Works. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 2010.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

5 Poems by A.R. Ammons

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in romantic tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
• Diacritics 3 (1973). An entire "essays on Ammons" issue.

External links

Poems

• "An Improvisation for Angular Momentum" and "So I Said I Am Ezra" at Poem of the Day.
• A.R. Ammons profile and 6 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• A.R. Ammons 1926-2001 at the Poetry Foundation.
• A.R. Ammons Poetry and Translations at the Open Translation Project sponsored by Bryant H. McGill

Books

• A.R. Ammons at Amazon.com

About

• A.R. Ammons at American Authors by Answers.com
• A.R. Ammons in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) at Modern American Poetry.
• David Lehman (Summer 1996). "A.R. Ammons, The Art of Poetry No. 73". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1394/the-art-of-poetry-no-73-a-r-ammons. 
• Lehman, David. "A.R. Ammons' Life and Career."
• A.R. Ammons Interviewed by David Grossvogel

Etc.

• Diacritics